How to Make the Best of a Bad Situation

If you hadn’t already seen, those were the words of White House press secretary Robert Gibbs acknowledging Vice President Joe Biden’s hiccup last month, and in my opinion, one of the best examples of someone embracing a PR nightmare.

As PR professionals, we are trained to protect corporate reputation. Whether it’s internally or externally, much of what we do all adds up to defending reputation, whether it be of an organization or brand.

So when an external force does something to harm the reputation we are protecting, we want to do everything in our power to stop it. Unfortunately (or fortunately), rapidly-changing technology and social media has made stopping this increasingly difficult. We cannot remove every Tweet, video and blog comment when something goes wrong.

So what can we do? How can we stop it?

I recently attended a three-day training session about brands, and one of the main lessons I learned was that most of the time, trying to stop someone or something from hurting an organization’s reputation is not the best path forward. We need to embrace what is coming at us and think about how we can take the bad and turn it into something good.

So while we cant always stop the bad, if we are able to take a step back and ask ourselves if the situation we’re dealing with is “a big f**king deal”, we will be able to understand how to make the best of a bad situation.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 2nd, 2010 at 12:36 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.